KIRKUS REVIEW

A
young landscaper gets caught up in the drug trade in this debut novel.

Bobby Patrick is a 24-year-old in Austin, Texas, whose days are spent getting
high, swimming in the lake, and dreaming about how to get ahead. A dyslexic, he
failed to get through college, as words on a page “ran every which direction,
as if something big was chasing them.” He has a new girlfriend, Katherine “Katie”
Ann Smith, a waitress at a local diner, and the two are getting serious and
talking marriage. Within their relatively small social universe, which is
largely made up of marijuana dealers and thieves who have wealthy parents,
Bobby and Katie navigate through various personal dramas. Katie’s not-so-nice
best friend, Sara, slept with Bobby once. Katie doesn’t know about it, and Sara
is holding it over Bobby’s head. Katie harbors a skeleton or two in her
closet as well. While Bobby struggles to save money as a landscaper, he and
Katie plan to open a restaurant. Katie has an affluent lawyer father, but there
is a complication. Sara gets arrested and wants Bobby to bail her out and pay
for an attorney. Just as Bobby realizes Sara may have gotten mixed up with the
wrong people in the drug trade, he faces an uncertain future as he is drawn
further into a mess that may have more to do with Katie than he could ever have
imagined. Burlison sets his story in the heady days of the early 1990s in
Austin, though his characters are perhaps more aloof than one would expect of
the Generation X social scene. But they are certainly Texans. Bobby, an East
Texan, is a scrappy self-starter and problem solver, while Katie and Sara are
forthright and controlling, but still looking to daddy to bail them out.
Burlison manages to make Bobby a sympathetic protagonist, even though the
characters here are involved with drugs by their own choice. The winding and
increasingly sinister plot holds some exciting scenes. But the author relies
too much on small talk and continual dialogue, and he takes his time shaping
the storyline.

A steamy tale and beguiling thriller, with plenty of local color and some
provocative twists.

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